Weblogging or “blogging” has emerged in the past few years as a new grassroots publishing medium. Like electronic mail and the web itself, weblogging has taken off and by some estimates the number of weblogs is doubling every 6 months. As of June 2006, BlogPulse estimates place the number of active weblogs at nearly 10 million blogs, of which about 36% have had at least one post in the past 3 months. BlogPulse finds approximately 60,000 new weblogs each day. Statistics published by other blog search engines such as Technorati and PubSub are similar. However, these estimates may well be excluding large numbers of non-English language weblogs.
A weblog is commonly defined as a web page with a set of dated entries, in reverse chronological order, maintained by its writer via a weblog publishing software tool. We can define each entry as a set of one or more time-stamped posts; an author may typically post several times a day. This is a matter a style, as some authors post at most once a day in an all-inclusive entry. Others prefer to micro-post, making each published item a separate post in the day's entry.
Due to the popularity of weblogs, there is a need for a method of searching individual posts within weblogs. The present invention addresses this need.